Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Kenneth Wigger, who writes:
One Friday evening I contacted Larry W6LVP and asked a question about the kind of coax that he would recommend for his Magnetic Loop antenna. I was surprised to get a response with technical information within an hour or so. With this kind of customer service I decided to go ahead and order one of his antennas later that evening. I actually received the antenna on Monday afternoon within a couple days.
I have extreme electrical noise that was S-8 most of the time on my Carolina Windom and made my radio almost unusable. I temporarily installed the Magnetic Loop antenna on a short 5 FT pole in the backyard. With the XYL as the null monitor at the radio I called her on my cell phone and rotated the antenna by hand and was able to get a sharp noise null of about S-1. Very tight null when rotating just a few degrees one way or the other. Went in the house and couldn’t believe the clear signals that were hidden by the previous high noise level. It reminded me of SWLing 50 years ago as a kid back in the good old days before the electrical noise environment turned so bad!
As I mentioned, the antenna arrived within a couple days and was of high quality construction and packed extremely well for shipment. I had read the previous reviews about Larry’s product quality and customer service and my experience was also very good!!
I am planning to mount the antenna on a Channel Master rotator one of these days to get the full effect of the excellent directionally of this Magnetic Loop antenna. I even read where Broadcast Band Listeners use this antenna to pick up and select between multiple stations on the exact same AM frequencies.
I highly recommend Larry W6LVP and his Magnetic Loop antenna to other Hams and SWL listeners. He responds personally to emails within a business day usually just an hour or two. What more could a customer ask for?
Thank you, Kenneth, for sharing your review! It’s nice to have an alternative to the pricier Wellbrook and Pixel Loop antennas. Someday, I’ll get around to reviewing the W6LPV loop antenna as well.
I don’t begrudge anyone making bucks by selling them, but it’s kind of sad that SWLing & ham radio – two hobbies once dominated by hands-on experimenters, where antenna-building in particular was considered the most entry-level of skills – are now mostly reduced to yet another ‘spend hours Googling “best antenna”, evaluating “best” based on randomly-scattered opinions or current groupthink, then buying it!’ Pokémon hunt.
At worst it leads to spending time, effort, and money on completely inappropriate antennas – like a ‘Carolina’ Windom; an unbalanced (off-centre fed, single feedline or not) design with added feed-line pickup, whose only saving grace is that it can be made sort of resonant for transmitting at ham-appropriate frequencies – for reception in an obviously noisy environment.
(My apologies to Kenneth if your an active ham & shortwave listening is only a very secondary use of your Windom – but it’s still not really a good, or even appropriate, antenna for SWLing.)
At absolute best you might make a good choice through skill or luck, & end up with something appropriate to your environment – like a low impedance loop, tuned or untuned, amplified or unamplified, that’ll improve SNR & allow you to null out the worst of the noise in typical suburbia – for a fairly appropriate ~US$300.
(I also don’t begrudge the designers their selling price – even as a hobby R&D takes time & money, it’s nice to recoup a bit of that, and then you have the overheads & costs of commercial or semi-commercial selling – but I do sometimes wonder about the price : “what you actually get” ratio. Particularly when you know what the component costs are, then see things like certain famous commercial loops with the important bits built on ratty scraps of veroboard…)
Or you could go back to the hobby’s roots, built yourself a tuned &/or amplified loop from scratch, learn a lot, and – provided you can follow simple instructions, count to 12, and solder – get _at least_ 95% of the performance of a commercial unit for less than 1/3 the price.
Good news. I have the original Pixel RF Pro-!B and it is an excellent broadband antenna. Competition is necessary to prevent monopolistic pricing. Hopefully, Larry will arrange for his antenna to be capable of mass production if he eventually becomes incapable of continuing to market it. Both Wellbrook and DX Engineering need the competition to drive the retail prices of these excellent down to ~$300 or LESS.
… of these excellent antennas down to ~$300 or LESS.